Tag Archives: reputational risk

Brands Being Used in Pornography Search Engine Poisoning

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Recently, during one of our TigerTrax™Targeted Threat Intelligence engagements, we were performing passive threat assessments for a popular consumer brand. In the engagement, we not only gathered targeted threat intelligence about their IT environments, applications and hosting partners, but also around the use of their brand on a global scale. The client had selected to take advantage of our dark net intelligence capabilities as well, and were keenly interested in how the dark net, deep web and underground portions of the Internet were engaged with their brand. This is a pretty common type of engagement for us, and we often find a wide variety of security, operational and reputational issues.

This particular time around, we ran into a rather interesting and new concern, at least on the dark net. In this case, a dark net pornography site was using the consumer brand embedded as an HTML comment in the porn site’s main pages. Overall, there were several hundred name brands in the comments. This seems to have been performed so that the search engines that index the site on the dark net, associate the site with the brands. That means when a user searches for the brand name, they get the porn site returned as being associated. In this case, it was actually the first link on several of the dark net search sites we tested. The porn site appears to be using the brand names to lure eyeballs to the site – essentially to up the chance of finding a subscriber base for their particularly nasty set of pornography offerings. Search engine poisoning has been an issue on the public web for some time, and it is a commonly understood tactic to try and link your content to brands, basically serving as “click bait” for users. However, on the dark net, this was the first time we had observed this tactic being used so overtly.

The brand owner was, of course, concerned about this illicit use of their brand. However, there is little they could do to respond, other than reporting the site to the authorities. Instead, after discussing various options, we worked with them to identify an action and response plan for how they would handle the problem if it became a public concern. We also worked with them to identify a standard process that they could follow to bring their existing legal, marketing, management and other parts of their incident response team up to date on threats like these as they emerged.

The client was very pleased to have the discussion and with the findings we identified. While any misuse of their brand is a concern, having their brand associated with pornography or other illicit material is certainly unnerving. In the end, there is little that organizations can do, other than work with authorities or work on take down efforts if the brand is misused on the public web. However, having the knowledge that the issue is out there, and working to develop the threat into existing response plans certainly goes a long way to help them minimize these kinds of risks.

To learn more about dark net brand issues, targeted threat intelligence or passive assessments, drop us a line (info@microsolved dot com) or get in touch on Twitter (@lbhuston) for a discussion. 

Learn More About TigerTrax Services in Our Webinar

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After the powerful launch of TigerTrax last week, we have put together a webinar for those folks looking to learn more about our TigerTrax™ services and offerings. If you want to hear more about social media code of conduct monitoring, passive analysis and assessments, investigation/forensics and threat intelligence enabled by the new platform, please RSVP.

Our webinar will cover why we built TigerTrax, what it does and how it can help you organization. We will discuss real life engagements using the TigerTrax platform across a variety of verticals and looking at social, technological and trust issues. From data mining threat actors to researching supply chain business partners and from helping pro-sports players defend themselves against accusations to monitoring social media content of key executives, the capabilities and examples are wide ranging and deeply compelling.

Register for the webinar by clicking here. Our team will get you registered and on the way to leveraging a new, exciting, powerful tool in understanding and managing reputational risk on a global scale.

The webinar will be held Wednesday, March 12, 2014 at 3 PM Eastern time. Please RSVP for an invitation. Spots are limited, so please RSVP early.

As always, thanks for reading. And, if you would prefer a private briefing or discussion about TigerTrax, give us a call at (614) 351-1237 x206 and we will get a specialist together with you to help identify how MSI can help your organization.

Defending A Client with TigerTrax Investigative Services

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Rounding out this week of TigerTrax™ blog posts, I wanted to discuss a particular case where we used our investigative social media and forensics capabilities to defend a professional sports client who was being accused of some illicit behavior. The case is a fairly powerful example of how TigerTrax can be used for reputational defense.

In this incident, the player was approached online by a young lady. This young lady began following the player on many social media networks, and the player’s software automatically followed/friended back the young lady, just as it does for all of the player’s followers on the social media networks. Over the next few weeks, the young lady in question began several conversations with the player. They would begin innocent enough, but would then begin to be filled with innuendo and inappropriate overtones. The player responded to the conversations, but remained in line with expected conversations that you would want a player to have with fans. The player, at no time, responded to any of the innuendo or more sexual content.

Later, the young lady began to edit the player’s content, posting it to other social networks and bragging about it to her high school friends. Eventually, her parents were informed, and confronted the young lady. The young lady told a story to her parents ~ a story that involved the player initiating the contact and being the one who was pursuing inappropriate overtones. The parents, naturally enraged, contacted the team and the player to discuss the situation. MSI was retained by the team to investigate prior to the meeting and provided with a printed version of what the young lady asserted were the details of the conversation online.

MSI leveraged the power of TigerTrax to gather the social media content relevant to the engagement. We captured both sides of the conversations, and to our amazement, we discovered that the young lady had edited the content to fit her tale. Many of the posts in her printed version of the conversation were heavily edited. Most of the posts made by her were deleted from her version (and in some cases deleted by her from the social media sites, but cached in TigerTrax archives and the search engines). Recreating the entire timeline and assembling the real content was done by the MSI analysts, and in the end, the factual stream of data was presented to the team. Once the parents and the young lady were provided with the copies of the report at the meeting, the young lady admitted her fabrication and came clean with the whole story. The parents apologized and the team and player expressed their understanding and completed the incident with their reputations intact.

MSI was proud to be able to help a client defend their reputation. We believe these capabilities will be a powerful addition to many professional sports teams, talent agencies and corporations who are seeking to protect their reputational integrity and remain vigilant against online behaviors that could damage their brand. To learn more about TigerTrax and the services surrounding it, please contact your account executive or reach out to me via Twitter (@lbhuston). We look forward to working with you.

TigerTrax Monitoring vs Professional Sports & Business

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By now, you may have heard about our new TigerTrax™ powered services. We formally announced them this week and the interest in them has been very high. Today, I wanted to provide a bit more context to the last year or so, especially around a particular use case for TigerTrax that is pretty unique and intriguing.

We originally developed the TigerTrax platform to super charge our threat intelligence activities against real bad guys in the world. It grew out of our need to better manage and explore the vast amounts of data we get from the HoneyPoint Internet Threat Monitoring Environment (HITME), but even as we leveraged it against cyber-crime, other use cases quickly emerged.

One of these use cases was developed by engaging directly with an NFL team. The team worked with us over a number of months as we tweaked out the capabilities of the system and adapted it to more of a social focus than a crime focus for their needs. Today, the system provides ongoing monitoring of a number of social media sites and their content, continually providing for both positive examples of expected behavior, as well as identifying violations of the player code of conduct. With all of the press and public media attention to some high profile examples of athlete misconduct, the teams are now taking this very seriously.

MSI has developed TigerTrax into a modular platform that easily scales to monitoring all of the player, cheerleader, coaching, back-office and ownership staff against the code of conduct. The social media content is gathered in near real time, and an analytics engine provides advanced techniques to flagging potential behavioral issues. The system is also continually adapted to new forms of behavior, shifting social issues (bullying, homophobic and racial issues, etc.) and the evolving concerns of the team management. Combining the TigerTrax technology with a team of deeply skilled human analysts, strong player skill development expertise and social media education focused on personal branding and social leadership was a natural fit for the evangelical approaches that MSI has practiced for more than 20 years in our information security engagements.

In addition, one of the key differentiators of TigerTrax, is not just the analysis of the key parties’ (players, cheerleaders, coaches, etc.) content, but also the global content from the social media sphere around specific events and actors. Using this crowd-sourced sensor approach, we have been able to identify misbehaviors and code of conduct violations, simply by capturing the data and correlating/validating it from observers in the public. The same techniques have also allowed us to use the public data to defend players and other parties against grossly exaggerated or completely false accusations against their character. Indeed, for some players, TigerTrax has made an excellent tool in DEFENDING their reputations!

Over the last few years, we have taken the initial platform developed for threat intelligence against cyber-crime, and adapted it to a variety of professional sports, business applications, investigative and forensic activities. We have expanded the platform beyond simple keyword analytics and are beginning to actuate on sentiment, data flow anomalies and deeper content analytical problem solving. In the years to come, we view TigerTrax as a very capable core business empowerment platform for MSI, just as impactful as HoneyPoint has been since 2006. We are still developing use cases for TigerTrax and the service offerings it has empowered for our clients. If you have a potential new use case that you would like to discuss, or if you would like to hear more about reputational threat intelligence and monitoring, please give us a call.

MSI is also seeking a handful of key business partners interested in helping us grow the TigerTrax platform adoption by bringing these unique capabilities to their clients, or by adapting the capabilities into new service offerings. If your business has an idea for how to leverage the TigerTrax capabilities, give us a call. We will be happy to explore new solutions with you.

As always, thanks for reading and thanks for partnering with MSI!

MSI Announces TigerTrax Reputational Threat Services

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TigerTrax™ is MSI’s proprietary platform for gathering and analyzing data from the social media sphere and the overall web. This sophisticated platform, originally developed for threat intelligence purposes, provides the team with a unique capability to rapidly and effectively monitor the world’s data streams for potential points of interest.

 

The uses of the capability include social media code of conduct monitoring, rapid “deep dive” content gathering and analysis, social media investigations & forensics, organizational monitoring/research/profiling and, of course, threat intelligence.

 

The system is modular in nature, which allows MSI to create a number of “on demand” and managed services around the platform. Today the platform is in use in some of the following ways:

  • Sports teams are using the services to monitor professional athletes for potential code of conduct and brand damaging behaviors
  • Sports teams are also using the forensics aspects of the service to help defend their athletes against false behavior-related claims
  • Additionally, sports teams have begun to use the service for reputational analysis around trades/drafts, etc.
  • Financial organizations are using the service to monitor social media content for signs of illicit behavior or potential legal/regulatory violations
  • Talent agencies are monitoring their talent pools for content that could impact their public brands
  • Law firms are leveraging the service to identify potential issues with a given case and for investigation/forensics
  • Companies have begun to depend on the service for content monitoring during mergers and acquisitions activities, including quiet period monitoring and pre-offer intelligence
  • Many, many more uses of the platform are emerging every day

 If your organization has a need to understand or monitor the social media sphere and deep web content around an issue, a reputational concern or a code of conduct, discuss how TigerTrax from MSI can help meet your needs with an account executive today.

 

At a glance call outs:

  • Social media investigation/forensics and monitoring services
  • Customized to your specific concerns or code of conduct
  • Can provide deep dive background information or ongoing monitoring
  • Actionable reporting with direct support from MSI Analysts
  • Several pricing plans available

Key Differentiators:

  • Powerful, customizable, proprietary platform
  • Automated engines, bleeding edge analytics & human analysts to provide valuable insights
  • No web portal to learn or analytics software to configure and maintain
  • No heavy lifting on customers, MSI does the hard work, you get the results
  • Flexible reporting to meet your business needs

Three Tough Questions with Aaron Bedra

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This time I interviewed Aaron Bedra about his newest creation ~ RepSheet. Check it out here:


Aaron’s Bio:

Aaron is the Application Security Lead at Braintree Payments. He is the co-author of Programming Clojure, 2nd Edition as well as a frequent contributor to the Clojure language. He is also the creator of Repsheet, a reputation based intelligence and security tool for web applications.


Question #1:  You created a tool called Repsheet that takes a reputational approach to web application security. How does it work and why is it important to approach the problem differently than traditional web application firewalling?

I built Repsheet after finding lots of gaps in traditional web application security. Simply put, it is a web server module that records data about requests, and either blocks traffic or notifies downstream applications of what is going on. It also has a backend to process information over time and outside the request cycle, and a visualization component that lets you see the current state of the world. If you break down the different critical pieces that are involved in protecting a web application, you will find several parts:

* Solid and secure programming practices

* Identity and access management

* Visibility (what’s happening right now)

* Response (make the bad actors go away)

* HELP!!!! (DDoS and other upstream based ideas)

* A way to manage all of the information in a usable way

This is a pretty big list. There are certainly some things on this list that I haven’t mentioned as well (crypto management, etc), but this covers the high level. Coordinating all of this can be difficult. There are a lot of tools out there that help with pieces of this, but don’t really help solve the problem at large.

The other problem I have is that although I think having a WAF is important, I don’t necessarily believe in using it to block traffic. There are just too many false positives and things that can go wrong. I want to be certain about a situation before I act aggressively towards it. This being the case, I decided to start by simply making a system that records activity and listens to ModSecurity. It stores what has happened and provides an interface that lets the user manually act based on the information. You can think of it as a half baked SIEM.

That alone actually proved to be useful, but there are many more things I wanted to do with it. The issue was doing so in a manner that didn’t add overhead to the request. This is when I created the Repsheet backend. It takes in the recorded information and acts on it based on additional observation. This can be done in any form and it is completely pluggable. If you have other systems that detect bad behavior, you can plug them into Repsheet to help manage bad actors.  

The visualization component gives you the detailed and granular view of offenses in progress, and gives you the power to blacklist with the click of a button. There is also a global view that lets you see patterns of data based on GeoIP information. This has proven to be extremely useful in detecting localized botnet behavior.

So, with all of this, I am now able to manage the bottom part of my list. One of the pieces that was recently added was upstream integration with Cloudflare, where the backend will automatically blacklist via the Cloudflare API, so any actors that trigger blacklisting will be dealt with by upstream resources. This helps shed attack traffic in a meaningful way.

The piece that was left unanswered is the top part of my list. I don’t want to automate good programming practices. That is a culture thing. You can, of course, use automated tools to help make it better, but you need to buy in. The identity and access management piece was still interesting to me, though. Once I realized that I already had data on bad actors, I saw a way to start to integrate this data that I was using in a defensive manner all the way down to the application layer itself. It became obvious that with a little more effort, I could start to create situations where security controls were dynamic based on what I know or don’t know about an actor. This is where the idea of increased security and decreased friction really set it and I saw Repsheet become more than just a tool for defending web applications.

All of Repsheet is open sourced with a friendly license. You can find it on Github at:

https://github.com/repsheet

There are multiple projects that represent the different layers that Repsheet offers. There is also a brochureware site at http://getrepsheet.com that will soon include tutorial information and additional implementation examples.

Question #2: What is the future of reputational interactions with users? How far do you see reputational interaction going in an enterprise environment?

For me, the future of reputation based tooling is not strictly bound to defending against attacks. I think once the tooling matures and we start to understand how to derive intent from behavior, we can start to create much more dynamic security for our applications. If we compare web security maturity to the state of web application techniques, we would be sitting right around the late 90s. I’m not strictly talking about our approach to preventing breaches (although we haven’t progressed much there either), I’m talking about the static nature of security and the impact it has on the users of our systems. For me the holy grail is an increase in security and a decrease in friction.

A very common example is the captcha. Why do we always show it? Shouldn’t we be able to conditionally show it based on what we know or don’t know about an actor? Going deeper, why do we force users to log in? Why can’t we provide a more seamless experience if we have enough information about devices, IP address history, behavior, etc? There has to be a way to have our security be as dynamic as our applications have become. I don’t think this is an easy problem to solve, but I do think that the companies that do this will be the ones that succeed in the future.

Tools like Repsheet aim to provide this information so that we can help defend against attacks, but also build up the knowledge needed to move toward this kind of dynamic security. Repsheet is by no means there yet, but I am focusing a lot of attention on trying to derive intent through behavior and make these types of ideas easier to accomplish.

Question #3: What are the challenges of using something like Repsheet? Do you think it’s a fit for all web sites or only specific content?

I would like to say yes, but realistically I would say no. The first group that this doesn’t make sense for are sites without a lot of exposure or potential loss. If you have nothing to protect, then there is no reason to go through the trouble of setting up these kinds of systems. They basically become a part of your application infrastructure and it takes dedicated time to make them work properly. Along those lines, static sites with no users and no real security restrictions don’t necessarily see the full benefit. That being said, there is still a benefit from visibility into what is going on from a security standpoint and can help spot events in progress or even pending attacks. I have seen lots of interesting things since I started deploying Repsheet, even botnets sizing up a site before launching an attack. Now that I have seen that, I have started to turn it into an early warning system of sorts to help prepare.

The target audience for Repsheet are companies that have already done the web security basics and want to take the next step forward. A full Repsheet deployment involves WAF and GeoIP based tools as well as changes to the application under the hood. All of this requires time and people to make it work properly, so it is a significant investment. That being said, the benefits of visibility, response to attacks, and dynamic security are a huge advantage. Like every good investment into infrastructure, it can set a company apart from others if done properly.

Thanks to Aaron for his work and for spending time with us! Check him out on Twitter, @abedra, for more great insights!

3 Ways to Minimize Reputational Risk With Social Media

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You have employees who are addicted to social media, updating their status, sharing everything from discovering a helpful business link to where they went for lunch. However, they also may be broadcasting information not intended for public consumption.

One of the most difficult tasks for an organization is conveying the importance of discretion for employees who use social media. Not only are organizations at risk from having their networks attacked, but they must protect their reputation and proprietary ideas. What makes these two areas difficult to protect is their mobile nature. Ideas are invisible and have a habit of popping into conversations – and not always with the people who should be hearing them. They can get lost or stolen without anyone knowing they’re even gone. Suddenly, you find your competitor releasing a great product to your market that you thought was yours alone.

If you want to decrease reputational risk, you have a few options. Initiate some guidelines for employees. Send friendly reminders from newsworthy “social-media-gone-bad” stories. The more employees know where an organization stands in regard to safe social media use, the more they can be smart about using it. Here are three basic rules to help them interact safely:

1. Don’t announce interviews, raises, new jobs, or new projects.

Talking about any of these sensitive topics on social networking sites can be damaging. If an employee suddenly announces to the world that they’re working on a new project with XYZ Company, there’s a good chance the news will be seen by a competitor. You may see them in the waiting room of your client on your next visit. One caveat: If you’re hiring, it’s a good thing. Your organization will be seen as successful and growing. However, those types of updates are usually best left to the HR department.

2. Don’t badmouth current or previous employers.

It’s good to remember what mom used to say, “If you don’t have anything positive to say, then say nothing at all.” The Internet never forgets. When an employee rants about either their past employer, or worse – their current one, it can poison a customer’s view of the organization. Nothing can kill the possibility of a new sale than hearing an employee broadcast sour grapes. If this is a common occurrence, it can give the image of a badly managed company. This isn’t the message to send to either customers or future employees.

3. Stay professional. Represent the organization’s values well.

Employees are often tempted to mix their personal and work information together when using social media. Although many times, such information can be benign, you don’t want to hear about an employee’s wild night at the local strip club. There are mixed opinions among experts whether an employee should establish a personal account, separate from their work life.

Emphasize your organization’s values and mission. Ask employees to TBP (Think Before Posting). Social media can be a good experience as long as its done responsibly. With some timely reminders, reputational risk will be drastically reduced.